Stahlstadt
Stahlstadt is a city found by the German Professor Schultze to compete with France-Ville, and is found south of Oregon, ten leagues from the Pacific coast, Geography Stahlstadt is found on the far side of a landscape reminiscent of Switzerland where tall snowy cliffs pierce the sky and overlook the deep valleys. In fact, this Alpine scenery is simply a crust of rock, earth and centenary pines covering massive deposits of iron and coal. Travellers leaving this pleasant region and entering the desolate wilderness beyond will find several roads covered in ashes and coal, flanked by heaps of black rubble from which brilliant pieces of metal shine like basilisk eyes. Here and there travellers will see abandoned mine-shafts, eaten away by the rain, like the craters of small spent volcanoes. The air is heavy with irritating smoke and totally innocent of birds and insects. In living memory no butterfly has ever been seen in the area. Should travellers continue towards the north, they will find that this mining region spreads out into a plain. Here, between two low mountain chains, lies what up to 1871 was called the Red Desert, a wasteland of ferruginous sand, now called Stahlfield or Field of Steel. It was on this plain that, from 1872 to 1877, a number of prefabricated cabins, made in Chicago, were erected to form a garland of villages. Travellers today will see, in the centre of this garland, at the foot of the Coal Butts- a mound of coal- a bizarre and colossal conglomerate of geometrical buildings with hundreds of identical windows and red chimneys which even now belch out their poisonous green smoke. This uninhabited mass is all that is left of Stahlstadt, the City of Steel. Built in a space of five years by Professor Schultze of Jena University, Stahlstadt became not only a modern city but a model factory. Professor Schultze The plan of Stahlstadt consisted of a number of concentric circles, each of which had a different function within the complex. In the exact centre rose the Tower of the Bull, a vast construction with a single window, that dominated the surrounding buildings. At the bottom of this cyclopic tower Professor Schultze had his private rooms and, above these, his secret study. All doors were hermetically sealed. Travellers today can still see the tropical park built around the tower, with its palm trees, banana trees, eucalyptus and cacti, entangling vines and numerous fruits such as pineapples and guavas. In Professor Schultze's time, the temperature was mantained through a system of metallic tubes that carried the hot vapours of the nearby coal deposits. At the very top of the tower, Professor Schultze built the most impressive piece of artillery in the world, a long-range gun some 300,000 kilos in weight, so easy to handle that a child might have fired it. It used a highly dangerous explosive which in fact resulted in the city's downfall. On the morning of September 13, 1877, at precisely 11:45 P.M., Professor Schultze aimed the gun at the rival city of France-Ville, miscalculated, and the gun's projectile fired into the sky, and went into the orbit around the earth, where it remains to this very day. However, the rest of the explosive kept in Schultze's laboratory caught fire, and the Professor was asphyxiated. Without a leader, the city soon became abandoned, although the immense coal deposits still continue to burn in the empty factory. Today, Stahlstadt stands as a desolate monument to human vanity. Category:Pages Category:Places